Above Left: SUN RISING ON 2019! detail of image below. Portland with the sun rising just to its left...a golden light touching the rims of bushes and trees and the ships anchoring off Portland...(detail of complete image below right) gouache and site materials on Fabriano Artistico 640g/m2Above Right: rain pattering on Portland.below left: video offering another view back onto Portland from Durdle Door. Earth drawing.below right: PORTLAND LEGEND 1. New Year's Day 2019. Watercolour, gouache and local earths on paper.

SPRING OPEN STUDIO: 28 Feb - 3 March 201911-5pm daily

The studio has relocated to Weymouth. 5 minutes away from the rail station- mainline to London Waterloo.at other times please visit by appointment ​contact E: info@franceshatch.co.uk M: 07946903930

MY PRACTICE

Direct work en plein air is central to Frances' practice. She feels her way into the particularity of each site with all her senses. As I write Frances has moved her home and her studio into Weymouth. She is still based along The Chesil Beach but it is Portland that sits in front of her home now. She sees the sea upon waking. Her work will no doubt spring from this new perspective and this new context for her life.

'And that's the real value and privilege in what I do: it is by hanging around in a place that it reveals more and more of itself - and I know that for as long as I can be present to it- that vivid complexity will increase.'

Each site offers its own palette and initiates a way to begin her response… at times she integrates colour (with water-based binders: gouache, acrylic or watercolour) with what is available in the landscape and at others the geology and found material offers all.When grubbing around for tools and pigments in each environment, she makes discoveries about a place that she might otherwise miss.

If I were to imagine a cloud of creative companions I would be walking with the writer Nan Shepherd, trying to keep up with Richard Long's wide stride, bumping along a track in a carriage with JMW Turner, expressing watercolour overwhelm with Nolde, mixing colour with Berte Morisot and Gwen John, getting blown about with Joan Eardley (but I wouldn't bother with an easel), listening to rain falling with Thomas Merton (and then probably needing to write too...but certainly not as much), 'reading' a cliff face with geologist Ian West, working with 'what is' with Chris Drury.And in my nineties I would join Louise Bourgeois in working large and fearlessly.'

October 2018

Wet Wilding Moon. Made on location at Cogden carpark, Chesil. Site material, collage and acrylic on unstretched canvas. 26x30cm. August 2016.

detail of FRESHWATER SEA January 1st 2018. acrylic and site materials on handmade paper

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INSTAGRAM FEED: @francesahatch informal responses to moments as they come and go

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